Private schools play important role on developing economy especially in rural areas of Iran and when they operate efficiently it can also be considered as a rich source of income. During the past three decades, data envelopment analysis (DEA) has become a popular technique for measuring the relative performance of non-financial units. In this paper, we present an empirical study to measure the relative efficiency of 11 private universities located in region ten of Islamic Azad university. The proposed study of this paper assigns some points for human resources including university professor and regular employees and considers it along with assets as inputs of DEA model. We also consider the number of graduated students and operating profit as output of our proposed DEA model. The implementation of standard BCC method yields 6 efficient units and to have better results we use another DEA technique. The results of this study present some investment opportunities for management of this private university.

The purpose of this study is to explore the concept of cultural security and its practical implications in a case study of educational system. There are several definitions of culture, which describe different aspects of cultural security. In fact, cultural security tends to show various behaviors, thinking, beliefs and other people’s perspectives in a society, which represents the overall circumstances. Cultural security and its issues make it possible to have a clear image of a society or community. This paper aims to identify the important dimensions of cultural security in terms of basic components of cultural security identified in a framework. Therefore, after identifying the components, using a questionnaire, required data are gathered from the universities of the city of Ilam, Iran and they are analyzed by SPSS18.0 software and its appropriate statistical tests.

Child abuse is one of the most important issues in any society and any action to detect influencing factors could help take possible actions on its prevention. In this paper, we present an empirical study to find the impact of family income, occupation, size, age, education and drug addiction on growth of child abuse. The study uses a sample of 450 female students who were enrolled on guided schools in city of Esfahan, Iran. The study chooses 5 classes and in each school and 10 students are randomly selected. A questionnaire is designed and distributed among the sample people, which is categorized in four groups of physical, sexual, emotional and neglect child abuse. The results are analyzed using different tests including Pearson correlation test, Chi-Square, etc. to test different hypotheses. The results of our survey indicate that there are some meaningful relationships between different family characteristics including age, occupation, family size, educational background, and drug-addiction and child abuse. However, our survey does not provide any evidence to believe there is any relationship between home status and child abuse risk.

During the past few years, stock exchange investors confront numerous problems in terms of legal, environmental issues, etc. In this paper, we present an empirical study to detect important issues as barriers for investment in Tehran Stock Exchange. The study has categorized the issues into two groups of real world and legal issues. Since there are different issues involved as major barriers, the study uses analytical hierarchy process to rank them. The study extracts 18 important factors, which influence investors’ participation in Tehran Stock Exchange and using Borda method, prioritize them. The results of the survey indicate that in terms of real issues, Increase in quality of firms Financial Statement is number one priority followed by Increase stock exchange and agents’ proficiency and electronic equipment, Unchangeable investment market rules and bounding organization managers to flow them and Strict supervision on agents’ activities. In terms of legal issues, good supervision of provisions to force firms to reveal information correctly and restrict their secret bargaining is the most important factor followed by Using indirect investment guideline instead of direct investment, Increase in quality of firms’ Financial Statement and Investors’ training toward their rights.

Service quality plays an important role in service industries such as banks, insurance firms, etc. The purpose of this paper is to investigate level of service quality in private banking industry in Iran. The proposed model of this paper uses SERVQUAL tool for measuring service quality and population of this study includes customers of three private banks in Tehran. Results show that except efficiency, other variables of SERVQUAL obtained suitable level mean in this study. As a result, with the development of electronic commerce, internet banking has become an alternative for developing, operating and offering bank services.

During the past few years, there have been tremendous works on detecting the relationship between banks performance and the number of seats on board of directors. Board of directors of banks is responsible for shareholders ownership’s interest. In this study, governance and ownership characteristics affecting risk appetite on some private banks listed in Tehran Stock Exchange is studied. The study investigates 12 private banks for a period 2005-2011 based on the implementation of some regression analysis using panel data. The results indicate that the effect of five major shareholders on risk-taking is positive and significant. The effect of institutional ownership on risk-taking is negative and significant. Effects of other variables, including the percentage of ownership concentration, return on assets and the logarithm of cash from operations (CFO) on risk-taking of the private banks are not significant. The effects of board size, reliance on debt and log of assets on risk-taking are significantly negative among private banks in Iran. These results indicate that shareholders that are institutional investors play a key role in monitoring managers.

During the past few years, there have been growing interests on intellectual capital due to industrial changes on the market. Thus, identifying different ways to create, manage, and evaluate the impact of intellectual capital has remained an open area of research. One of the most important organizational capabilities, which could help organizations create and share knowledge is to effectively use knowledge to create competitive advantage. The primary objective of this study is to investigate the effects of intellectual capital on other components and their impacts on organizational learning capability using structural equation modeling. The statistical population includes 500 employees of an Iranian organization. The study uses a sample size including 273 people using Morgan statistical table. In our survey, human capital influences positively (0.330) on structural capital, human capital influences positively on relational capital (0.47) and relational capital influences positively on structural capital (0.455). In addition human capital influences positively on learning capabilities (0.06), structural capital impacts learning capabilities (0.355) and relational capital on learning capabilities (0.545).

During the past few years, there have been growing interests on intellectual capital due to industrial changes on the market. Thus, identifying different ways to create, manage, and evaluate the impact of intellectual capital has remained an open area of research. One of the most important organizational capabilities, which could help organizations create and share knowledge is to effectively use knowledge to create competitive advantage. The primary objective of this study is to investigate the effects of intellectual capital on other components and their impacts on organizational learning capability using structural equation modeling. The statistical population includes 500 employees of an Iranian organization. The study uses a sample size including 273 people using Morgan statistical table. In our survey, human capital influences positively (0.330) on structural capital, human capital influences positively on relational capital (0.47) and relational capital influences positively on structural capital (0.455). In addition human capital influences positively on learning capabilities (0.06), structural capital impacts learning capabilities (0.355) and relational capital on learning capabilities (0.545).

For years, e-commerce has generated competitive advantage for many industries especially in insurance industry where people could apply for any sort of insurance, very easily. In fact, insurance industry has become one of the most important sectors in the world. E-commerce, on the other hand, has absorbed various people in insurance industry to develop economic growth. However, applying e-commerce for insurance firms may encounter serious obstacles and it is important to know them properly and setup appropriate actions to remove them. In this paper, we present a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) technique based on DEMATEL with an adaptation of fuzzy logic to find important factors impacting implementation of e-commerce for life insurance industry. The proposed study of this paper designs a questionnaire and distributes it among some insurance experts and then we analyze them using fuzzy DEMATEL technique. Findings indicate that “lack of designing death table based on the existing statistics of population death in Iran”, “lack of variety in protections of life insurance in proportionate to society individual’s requirements by means of low level income of society individuals” and “lack of extensive advertisements for developing the culture of life insurance in country” are the most important factors influencing insurance industry for enhancing e-business.

One of the primary concerns in banking industry is to measure the relative importance of banking industry using popular multi criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques such as data envelopment analysis (DEA) and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). In this paper, we use these two MCDM techniques to measure the relative efficiencies of 16 private and governmental banks in terms of electronic payment. There are three inputs with DEA methods including the number of issued cards, the number of ATM machines and the number of POSs and there are two outputs including the number of successful ATMs and the number of successful POSs transactions. The proposed study of this paper uses the necessary data of one of Iranian provinces and the results of the implementation of DEA and TOPSIS have indicated that 9 out of 16 banks were efficient. Our study also indicates that mean of relative efficiency for private banks was 82% while this number was 75% for governmental banks.